Making Super Cheap 6mm Infantry

 Hi!

Just enough time to post a quick update before I head off down south for a week!

Vosk House Troops

I've had a lot of queries on how I make my own 6mm scale infantry so have decided to post up a bit of a tutorial on the process.

Materials

Materials

To make my 6mm scale infantry, I use EVA foam, ideally a sheet of 2.5mm thick available from Hobbycraft for about £1.25 and will make loads of infantry. The second sheet I use is slightly thinner, approximately 1.5mm which I think I picked up in a pack from The Range for about £5 for a pack of five.

The only other materials I used were plastic sticky backed gems that I got from Hobbycraft for £2.99 but has enough to make literally hundreds of infantry.

The bases are 40mm lollypop sticks, again picked up from Hobbycraft for about £1.25 for 50. 

Other materials are a metal ruler, a sharp hobby knife and a pair of scissors to cut small pieces. I've found that Gorilla Glue is the best for sticking the bits together but any superglue should do the job.

Construction

The first thing to do is to cut long strips of the EVA foam into 5mm strips. For this I use the sharp hobby knife but be aware that EVA foam will blunt a blade quite quickly for some reason!

Rule (Ironically I dislike this metal ruler!)

Next I use scissors to roughly cut little rectangles. You can measure them to keep them uniform in size but I don't really bother as they look ok even if they're not identical! I picked up a pair of sharp thread cutters from a charity shop which is ideal for this sort of thing but you can grab some cheap ones from The Range for under £2.00.

Chop Chop

Next up, glue them to their bases with some superglue followed by some small strips of the thinner EVA foam to represent guns. I've not tried making fantasy or pre-gunpowder figures with this method but will do some experimenting to see how it works out but in theory, it should work just as well!

Tiny obelisks begin to look like actual figures

The final step is to add some extra details. For this I stuck the little gemstones onto the top to give them helmeted heads and a small square of EVA foam on their back to represent backpacks.

Infantry taking shape

Painting

Once I've made a platoon worth of infantry I primed them all in pale grey then started painting proper!

Infantry nearing completion

I tend to paint using bold highlights and let the paint do much of the detail work in this scale as there's no point worrying about making super detailed paintwork as you won't see it on the table! The visors are just painted on as are the infantry's hands on their weapons. The legs are similarly painted on using some small stripes of paint and voila, they're done!

Complete infantry

The last element is to prime the bases with dark brown then add some flock and the figures are done and dusted. Hopefully folks will find this useful and I'll see about making a separate page on the blog for a guide to making them, updated to show different kinds of infantry figures once I've made them!

I'm about to pack to head down south for the week so updates won't be happing until I return so until then, All the best!